Final Essay

Ok here's what I'm thinking for the final essay:

I want to see how Foucault's 'author function' functions in the short story "El gaucho insufrible" by Roberto Bolaño. I am taking a class with Rita de Grandis right now about Latin American short stories and the whole approach is based on looking at the author's biography and how we can see the biographical elements influencing the text. Furthermore, the text is strongly based on a Borges short story, thus there is a huge amount of intertextuality. So I thought it would be interesting to explore how we still use the author function to examine a literary text.

I will also look at "The Death of the Author" by Barthes and I plan to look at Barthes' From Work to Text", along with some other scholarly articles.

Ranajit Guha "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency"

The reading starts off by stating that there is a misconception that peasant revolts arise with a lack of consciousness on the part of that group of people. Or as Guha puts it "insurgency is regarded as external to the peasant's consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate fro Reason" (47).  In fact, Guha wants to show that this is not so and that there is in fact a precursor to the revolt, that there is often an antecedent mobilization that does not include violence. 

This 'blind spot' in historiography is examined by use of colonial discourse, which is made up of three types: 1) primary, 2) secondary and 3) tertiary. The primary discourse is 'official' (although this is to be taken in a very broad sense). Here Guha gives some examples of official letters that were sent amongst army officials that spoke of uprisings which convey "the impact of a peasant revolt on its enemies in its first sanguine hours" (50). The secondary discourse constitutes things that were written well after the fact, that is sometime after the actual event and thus it is seen as history (for example, memoirs or the work of administrators). In secondary discourse, the readership is public and non-official.  Both 1) and 2) work together to create a narrative which introduces a particular code (the way we read the text). Therefore, the primary and secondary discourse in historiography of peasant revolts are the "specimens of the prose of counter-insurgency" (59).  Tertiary discourse is farther removed in time, often in third person and non-official. There is also some tertiary discourse which aims to break away from the code of counter-insurgency and to adopt the point of view of the insurgents. However, as Guha concludes, tertiary discourse (even the radical kind) has only distanced itself from the prose of counter-insurgency by declaration and not by action. This is for several reasons, one of which includes the fact that tertiary discourse is reluctant to accept the religious element in insurgents.

I found this text interesting because it proposes to look at historiography from a code based perspective and thus it allows for us to see how limited the discourse around historical events, such as uprises caused by insurgents, can be. Also, it is perhaps a good method to see the faults of historians and this can generate a discussion for how to represent and approach history but also what sources to use (and to what extent to use them) when attempting to portray a historical event. 

What difference does it make who is speaking?

"What is an Author?" by Michel Foucault is a text which aims at questioning the notion of the author (as seen in the title).  I enjoyed this text, the style is simple (which is greatly appreciated on my part). Foucault goes through the different approaches to what an "author" is. "Author" can be seen as the writer of a certain text (many of us view authors in this way) but a text can also be anonymous and without an author (literary anonymity- as certain texts did in the past). He also explores many notions related to the author, for example, the fact that the author's name isn't just a proper noun but rather "a certain mode of being of discourse"(107). Here he brings up a large part of his argument, which relates the idea of authorship to being not just an element of discourse but rather a mode of discourse (so outside of just being a subject or object or being replaces by a pronoun).

At the end, after his summary, Foucault says that the idea of the author is something that is related to its historical time-period (postmodern, yes?) and that one day we may get beyond this, when he states "it does not seem necessary that the author function remain constant in form, complexity, and even in existence" (119). However, even though the author function may operate in another mode, Foucault mentions that this will still be within a system of constraint, so it is not something that is absolutely freeing. He concludes with the sentence "What difference does it make who is speaking?" (120). This to me seems to be saying that the author isn't what is important but rather the importance lies in what the text itself is saying. This makes me think of Roland Barthes "Death of the Author" in the sense that in both it is not the author which is of importance (because in Barthes' text the author is an agglomeration of all texts and ideas written beforehand- nothing is original and everything is intertextuality). Foucault also seems to be alluding to Barthes in page 102 when he states that writing is "a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears", hence implying the 'death' of the author that Barthes spoke of.

bell hooks- Is Paris Burning?

This text is a critique of the documentary film "Paris is Burning", directed by Jennie Livingston. The film is about Drag Balls in New York City which focuses mainly on black cross-dressers and transgendered individuals. In the text, we receive here and there ideas about identity theory (queer theory?), such as the idea that "identity is always perceived as capable of construction, invention, change"(145). I don't know much about queer theory, but I think this notion is extremely important for feminist theory. I relate it to sex vs. gender- sex being the biological components and gender as the construction of identity. Gender, as being part of our identity, is a full on construction- it is not natural, it is something that has been shaped by our conscious (or subconscious?) decisions and also by the society around us.

Another important line in the text is "The mastery of the feminine is not feminine. It is masculine..." (148). The cross-dressers try to look as realistically feminine as possible but by achieving this they are actually acting in a 'traditional' male way since they are dominating what is female. What's confusing is that they're trying to construct a 'feminine' identity, but really they end up with a 'male' one anyway? If the cross-dressers original goal is to appear feminine, doesn't his conscious construction of this identity make him so, at least partially? Who decides that this makes him masculine?

What interested me most in this text though was when hooks talks about the "neutral" gaze and the assumption amongst whites that this is possible for them to achieve. If we acknowledge that no gaze is ever really "neutral" then the whole idea of a documentary film becomes problematic. Usually, we refer to documentary films as a portrayal of reality but we're not quick to think about the fact that the documentary film, just like every other film, is manipulated by its creator. What we are shown (and what we are not shown) is deliberate. Therefore, is it really a 'realistic' portrayal of reality? The text seems to be suggesting that it is not.

Lastly, I don't completely understand how the title is related to the actual film itself because it is filmed in New York City. Maybe it was mentioned, but I forgot? Anyway, the reference to Paris just makes me think of Josephine Baker.

Lakoff- Anger

"Emotions are often considered to be feelings alone, and as such they are viewed as being devoid of conceptual content. As a result, the study of emotions is usually not taken seriously by students of semantics and conceptual structure" (Lakoff 380).

I think that the above quote is the key to the whole reading. This is exactly what Lakoff is arguing against. The rest of the text is thus basically a breakdown of how the emotion of 'anger' is put into different conceptual concepts. He is showing that expressions of anger are not random but are metaphorical and metonymical in nature. Thus, it is an investigation into expressions that are understood metaphorically (and he gives many many examples of different types of these expressions).

One things that I found interesting is how Lakoff relates the expressions of anger to common folk theory. That is, he shows how the traditionally held belief that anger has a physical effect on the body has created a large number of metaphorical expressions that go along with the description of the type of anger. For example, when someone's "blood is boiling", there is a reference to the high blood pressure that a person experiences while he/she is angry. Furthermore, we can relate this to another object, a kettle, which also has a lot of pressure inside of it and thus makes its contents boil. So then, the argument is that the conceptual metaphors used for anger are not arbitrary but rather motivated by our physiology. Furthermore, I get the impression that Lakoff is trying to give this reading a scientific air. I suppose I might be basing this on the type of language that he's using but also the amount of examples that he gives so as to justify his argument. I'm not saying this is a bad thing though.

However, I guess I'm not 100% sure what Lakoff is meaning to say by all this. Does he mean that our bodily reactions to emotions such as anger will determine how we express these emotions verbally and that this is something fixed rather than random? Is that the general idea?

Raymond Williams "Culture is Ordinary"

Although I am going to present on this tomorrow, I'll give you a brief summary of what Williams is talking about in this reading (or at least what I understood of it).

The most important phrase in this whole reading, which is repeated several times throughout the text is when Raymond Williams states that "culture is ordinary". However, what exactly does he mean by this? Generally, it means that every human society has its own shape, meanings and expresses these in their own institutions and thus the making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions- i.e writings themselves into the land (p. 4).  According to Williams, a culture has 2 aspects:
1) known meanings and directions
2) new observations and meanings

This seems to imply that there are things in a culture which is more or less static (traditions to a degree?) but also that the aspects within that culture are continuously changing and adapting. He also says there are two meanings of the word culture:
1) a whole way of life
2) the arts and learning

Williams uses both of these usages rather than just one or the other. I think we all use both of these meanings, depending on the context of what we are trying to say. Generally when we say someone is 'cultured' we think of 'the arts and learning', yet when we ask someone what their culture is we are referring to 'a whole way of life'. There are also two senses of culture which seem to have been born within English society (but also could be a more general sense, I'm not sure if he meant it to be global):
1) cultivated people, apart from the ordinary people
2) 'culture-vultures'- highbrows who use this argot as an attempt to influence ordinary people

Williams refuses to acknowledge these two sense of culture (actually he denies a lot in this reading). He believes that culture is not limited to a certain group of people but rather is structured and available to and by all, that is why it is 'ordinary'. It is a very democratic approach towards the definition of culture, especially when referring to a time period such as industrialization in which the distinction between the elite and the masses was quite distinctly separated.

There is more to this reading (of course, there always is), but I'll leave it at that and expand more during my presentation.

PE: Deus ex Machina

I don't consider myself to be a very good fiction writer, so I found the reading "Deus ex Machina" quite useful and interesting. It gives tools towards how to steer a plot line in the direction that you want it to through the use of 'machines'. Basically, the writer of the text states that "any artistic text is a machine working on the reader: a 'machine' not only in the figurative sense, but in the strictly cybernetic sense as well- as a transforming device" (p. 53). So to me this means that the 'artistic text' (as a tool for transformation) allows the reader to follow the plot the way that the writer of the text wants he/she to. Or, in other words, the writer uses these 'machines' to make the plot develop in a certain way.

The writer of PE then goes on to explain different types of machines that are present in artistic texts.
1) Physical machines (example: the water pipe in Lawrence's story as a mover of the action)
2)Social and Linguistic Machines (example: the legend of Romulus and Remus in the time machine story)
3)'Ready-made' objects (example: the legend can also be considered a 'ready-made' object which guides the story plot)
4)Magical Machines (example: fairy tales which are also 'ready-made' objects and steer the plot a certain way)
5) Universal Plot Machine and Denouement Machine (example: a ferris wheel moves in the same way as a story line- from up to down, etc.)

What I found most interesting about this reading was the following lines: "That is why the role played by the machine is often predictable. A gun must fire; a horse, car or train can be ridden; a wheel turns; and so on" (p. 55). These objects give off a sense of fate- their function is sealed. Often when I read things, if there is say, a gun, in a story, it is true that I automatically predict that something regarding the gun will produce a change in the story- for example someone getting shot. However, even though I realize that certain objects in a story have more significance than others, I never thought of them as machines that are transformative devices. It just never occurred to me to classify them that way but after reading this text, it does make sense to do so. This reading should be used in a "Learn to write fiction class" (if it isn't being used in those types of classes yet), it could be very useful to people, myself included. It would be interesting to analyze a text while comparing and connecting the 'machines' to the literary themes.

"The Death of the Author" and Barthes short snippets on culture

I actually really like "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes. From what I understood, he's basically saying that the idea of "authorship" no longer exists (or never did, we just chose to attribute an author to a text). The person writing the text is taking ideas and words from a bank of information which is technically available to everyone and anyone, so we can't really attribute a book to an author but rather a 'modern scriptor' who is born simultaneously with the text. Thus, by taking away the importance of the author and all the power that goes along with it, the importance of the text turns to the reader. This is what I especially like about what Barthes is arguing- the power is no longer in the author but in the reader. It is the reader who determines the interpretation of the text. Since I don't consider myself a spectacular writer but rather a spectacular reader, this particularly tickles my fancy. Quoting Barthes, "to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing". This is because then we are interpreting the text based on how the Author wanted us to. We do this through the biographical information of the author, his expressed desires and motifs about the text, etc. However, when we choose to say that the text has no author, just a scriptor, then we no longer have the latter elements to deal with in our interpretation. It really becomes about us (the readers)- how we choose to approach and view what we are reading. It really is a completely different way of looking at books and literature.

However, I can see how people would find it difficult to completely disassociate the author from the text. We've been taught for our whole lives to look at the author's historical and biographical context and how that influenced the text that he/she was writing. I can't help thinking that this really does influence the text, but perhaps I can't shake that thought because I've been taught to associate the two together (that is, author and text)? Can we completely get past the idea of "author"?

As for the other little texts by Barthes, "Toys", "Striptease","Wine and Milk" and "The Blue Guide", I found them all very entertaining. He introduces us to several aspects of French culture and tradition and breaks them down so as to show what the meaning behind them is (or, cultural significance). I especially enjoyed the "Wine and Milk" short text, in particular the following sentence: "There is no situation involving some physical constraint (temperature, hunger, boredom, compulsion, disorientation) which does not give rise to dreams of wine".

Thoughts on Communism

 I had to read the Communist Manifesto in high school, so I know what the general idea is. Examining it this time around, these are some thoughts that came to my head:

1) the idea of breaking the traditional formation of society (i.e. the class structure) and thus getting away from the problems associated with the class struggles, for example the upper classes oppressing the lower classes, is a grand idea, but it is much too utopian. I'm sure most of us are thinking this. There are always going to be people who are greedy and who will want to make more money and there will also be those who are lazy and don't want to work- neither will want to benefit society but rather themselves. This won't ever change. However, bringing about certain socialist ideas, such as the healthcare benefits that we enjoy in Canada, are definitely not a bad idea. There has to be a compromise between a purely communist society and a purely capitalist society- extremes are never good (at least that's how I see it). There may be a better system to run a country, but either we haven't found it yet or it simply doesn't exist. Then again, no system is perfect, we just have to try to improve and update our own way of structuring things so as to adapt to current society.

2) Marx's proletariat/bourgeoisie distinction and class struggle is suggested to be a global phenomenon- yet it is not. This is a very eurocentric and does not apply to many other countries in the world. Thus the way that he proposes to solve the issues related to the proletariat/bourgeoisie cannot be seen as a system that can be applied globally. I think this is a common criticism of Marx's theory.

3) When I was researching for my undergraduate honors thesis (which was about the flâneur in the latin american avant-garde), I found out that everything is related to communism. Like my whole paper is interwoven with communist theories. In particular, I read a lot about the condition of modern life and how this is strongly based on alienation. There was a break from tradition and hence the individual is left incompatible with bourgeois society. As Marx stated "all that is solid melts into air" (the eponymous title of Marshall Berman's book)- the solidity of our world seems to "melt into air" and hence we experience alienation. So the socio-political aspects of the early 1900's was a huge influence of the era of modernity which greatly affected the writers and artists of the time and therefore has a strong relevance to literature and how it was consequently shaped.

Ok, that's all.

Freud- "The Interpretation of Dreams"

So while reading this text, I couldn't help thinking that Freud is a kind of full of bullshit. The way that he analyzes dreams and goes so in depth with the meaning seems ridiculous. I'm sure that dreams have meaning but the way he dissects them seems so unbelievable, he goes so far as to dissect the meanings of the words that appear in our dreams and looks at every single possible association that goes along with it. I'll give him credit for his psychoanalytic method in the sense that it opened up doors for the field of psychiatry, but I feel like some of his interpretations are just based on nothing, like there's really no proof that all these associations that he uses to analyze elements in dreams really have anything to do with deconstructing the meaning behind the dreams. I feel like he interprets the dream to suit his diagnosis, which would be easy enough to do. Interpretation is always more or less biased- each person will see it in a different way.

Then I began thinking about how this is related to literary theory and I came to the conclusion that Freud's method of interpretation is similar to how we interpret literature. I remember having to read Shakespeare in highschool and the teacher would dissect every single word and show how it had all these different meanings in relation to the text, context (history), etc. and I remember thinking that there was no way that Shakespeare could have thought of all these meanings while writing his plays- if he had, then it would have taken him forever to complete anything. A lot of the time we overanalyze things but this process does allow us to find new meanings that the author might not have originally intended on- so in this way it becomes more personal to us. I guess we can do the same when we analyze dreams- we can give them a meaning that is personal to us. 

Propp "Morphology of the Folktale"

Reading this, I found myself wondering what the difference between a "folktale" and a "fairytale" is. Here's what wikipedia says about the definition of "folklore": Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of that culture, subculture, or group. 

So the general characteristics of the folktale that Propp outlines are: the hero leaves home, the hero is faced with a problem, the hero must overcome this problem, the bad guy comes into the picture and so forth. According to the definition, we can assume that this general storyline will weave in details about the customs and traditions of specific cultures. However, what I found the most surprising is that tales from different time periods and from different parts of the world all follow along a similar format. How can it be that this could be repeated within so many cultures and historical contexts?

This makes me think of this movie I saw a while ago, Waking Life by Richard Linklater. There's this scene with a couple talking about random things and they get on the subject of information and collective memory and how it seems like people all around the world simultaneously come up with the same idea yet they are all completely independent of each other. It's kind of like once someone thinks it up, this idea, this knowledge is out there for other people to grasp. Kind of like the structure of a folktale, someone thought it up and then it was repeated throughout the world. Propp shows how the storyline is the same, independent of the context and the characters, it's basically all aiming towards the same function. 

Here's the clip I'm referring to (they talk about it around the end, about at 2:30 minutes into the clip): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbAVF0L2Z-k&feature=related

But then again, maybe it's just a testament of human nature. Maybe that format is the basic steps to someone growing up and maturing, I mean we all have to leave home at some point, there's always going to be obstacles in the way and there will always be people who try to get in the way of our happiness and accomplishments. Maybe the folktale is just a way of showing children what they will eventually have to go through in life but told in a more fantastical and entertaining way.

Questions about Maupassant

The following question was asked:


"What do you think drove the characters to succumb to their weaknesses? And do you think these qualities are innate or that they were reactions in response to societal stimulus?"


Response:
I think that everyone experiences some sort of weakness but not all are able to overcome it. I'm not exactly sure why the two characters in the Maupassant story succumbed to their weaknesses, perhaps it is because it is much easier to just give up. Also, we cannot ignore that societal pressures are sometimes a huge burden which is difficult to ignore. However, I would hope that the negative characteristics shown in the story are not innate but rather socially constructed. Unfortunately, I feel that Maupassant is suggesting that they are innate, just as he seems to be suggesting that the social conduct of the characters (that is, the greed) is proof that human beings are naturally greedy. I would like to believe that if you took society away that people are innately good (and even in society) but I'm not sure I have much proof for this other than a gut feeling. Chicot and Magloire represent the opposite- they seem to have no remorse for their actions. But maybe there's more to it? 

Maupassant

From what I remember of Maupassant (I've only read Boule De Suif though), he tends to show the issues in society, perhaps we can classify it somewhat as social satire. I interpreted The Little Cask as representing human nature in a negative way. Both the old woman and Chicot have their own motives and don't really seem to consider the other party very much unless it is in their interest. In that sense, I found the story a bit depressing- in the end he leads her to an early death. Also, the old woman is shown as a contradiction- she seems very physically strong despite her old age but yet she is extremely weak when it comes to her drinking. It seems odd how Chicot would have known that the old woman would succumb to drinking.

So, both characters have their own weaknesses- greed and revenge. I wasn't thrilled with the story, I found the end to be flat and the approach to death non-emotional. This sounds super negative so I'l throw in some good things: I enjoyed the description of Chicot, "a red face and a round stomach", this made me chuckle. I also liked how it tied the earth in thematically, that is, that physical space plays such a large part in a persons life and their identity (as when she says "I was born here, and here I mean to die").

That's all for now.